


one thought

by spookyawards_archivist



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-04
Updated: 2006-01-04
Packaged: 2019-04-28 04:28:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14441391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookyawards_archivist/pseuds/spookyawards_archivist
Summary: what if krycek had gotten to the alien fetus before the rebel aliens?





	one thought

**Author's Note:**

> Note from alice ttlg, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Spooky Awards](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Spooky_Awards), and was moved to the AO3 as part of the Open Doors project in 2018. I tried to reach out to all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are the creator and would like to claim this work, please contact me using the e-mail address on [SpookyAwards' collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/spookyawards/profile).
> 
>  **Author's notes:** post-colonization

  
Author's notes: post-colonization  


* * *

Title: One Thought 

Author: probe 

(18 months earlier) 

February 1999 

El Rico Airbase 

West Virginia 

I had wrapped the alien fetus in newspaper before stuffing it into my backpack. The truth was that the thing scared the fuck out of me. I didn't want it defrosting on my watch, couldn't risk anyone, of any species, getting pissed off at me this late in the game. 

I slung my pack over my shoulder and bolted out of that place. The faceless rebels would be right behind me and we were all screwed, deal off and no survivors, if they got the little frozen freak show before I did. 

I had the company car's speedometer 50 miles over the limit until I reached the hangar doors at El Rico. If the cops had tried to stop me, I fully INTENDED to mow them down with the arsenal piled in the backseat. But no problems. maybe there was something in the air that smelled like the end of the world. No one gave a shit about my car speeding to the airbase hangar. 

Spender took the fetus as soon as I got there. It looked like he hadn't bothered to let long lost Jeffrey in on the big exodus from earth. I shrugged it off. That was his business. 

The hangar was damn cold and the looks I was getting from my fellow space bound passengers equally icy. Diana made it a point to avoid eye contact, to let me know she was avoiding eye contact. staring me down, then turning away as if she didn't recognize me. I guess she wanted it obvious that she considered herself far above the assignments we'd shared in Europe, especially those parts where we'd fucked.   
She was part of the elite inner circle now, one of the nameless, and she expected me to act accordingly. Bitch. 

Cassandra Spender got wheeled into the mess. I guess we were all ready to go: me, and a bunch of people who would just as soon kill me or let me die. I have to admit it: eternity was already looking a little tarnished before Mulder and Scully showed up. 

Skinner was behind them,   
his head shiny, sweat dripping down the sides of his face. Mulder nodded at Diana and got the privilege of a return nod. Mulder was about to charge in my direction. I have no idea what he might have said to me. Maybe he just wanted to hit me one last time before his Close Encounters wet dream was realized.   
God forbid I should hit him back and scratch that priceless alien enhanced head of his. 

How the hell had they gotten him here? Maybe Diana deserved her haughty stance near the old boys. 

Mulder didn't quite make it into my face though. A small hand had his   
arm, stopped him in his tracks. 

Scully wasn't staying. 

"This isn't right Mulder." Her voice was breathy and low and absolutely certain. 

"It's the only way to survive," Mulder told her and he sounded primed for a fight. Before anyone could blink he had his gun out and trained on his partner. "You're not going anywhere." 

All conversation stopped and Diana joined Mulder behind the barrel of his gun. "Agent Scully, what's the problem?" she said in her newly awarded voice of authority. See, this was why it took someone like Diana, someone willing to do whatever it took to work her way into this hangar, so damn long to get out of those vague European assignments. She just can't objectively judge her own success and failure. I think Diana expected to gun down Scully for being a party pooper or some such shit. Which was all wrong, of course. 

"He won't shoot her," I said calmly. And that was the truth, even if Scully and I were the only ones who believed it. 

"Put down the gun, Mulder!" and Skinner had his out, too. This was getting interesting. 

I know the bluebloods had to be wondering who the hell had invited these three to their salvation. Someone behind me actually gasped, and it was all I could do not to turn and stare. Give me a break! Was anyone in this room innocent of spilling blood or letting it be spilled for them? 

"Mulder," Scully put her hand on the gun. Scully looked unafraid. Her pale skin was nearly glowing in that gray lit cavernous room. I remember realizing then that there was one innocent person in that hangar.   
One person who wouldn't climb over a corpse just to save herself. Outside, a powerful wind rattled the entire building but the low tones of her voice were plain. 

"You go on," Scully said. "You need to see your sister and you need to see the truth." 

Watching her give up this escape I'd prized so highly for so long...I felt something. It affected me. that's all I can say. 

Diana looked relieved when Mulder lowered the gun and hung his head to put his gun back in its holster. He started crying. Of course.   
Pussy. 

I remember thinking:I give him a year, maybe two, without her. 

Then Skinner had her by the lapels. 

"Scully, you'll die. They're all going to die." But even Skinner knew he stood less chance than Mulder of swaying Scully's opinion. 

"I want to do what's right," she told him. 

Mulder dragged her into a bear hug. He was sobbing out loud, by then. very pathetic. Probably Skinner was crying too. Little did the bald bastard know that there was no chance in hell his name had made the guest list for this cruise. Looks like he could have used  
some of Scully's heroism that night. What a shame. 

The hangar doors opened and light spilled into the room. If Scully  
was going to leave then it was time to go. Mulder gripped her hard. 

I pried them apart. "Come with me," I said and I actually pulled her from her trench coat because Mulder had it like a vise. 

Don't even ask me what I was thinking. I'd take it back if I could. 

I nodded Mulder towards the light. "There they are," I told him. 

Oh, he looked. Of course he fucking looked. I mean, here they were...the answers, the truth, the missing sister! Hell, Scully would keep just a little longer. 

Mulder turned and I took Scully into my jacket, dragged her out of the hangar and out of the light and into the darkness on the other side. And this is the part that continues to fuck with me. Why? What the fuck did Scully do to me? 

Because it WAS her. She fucking blinded me with her fucking Idealism Spell. 

I gave up certain survival   
with the cowards and traitors in that hangar. That hangar was where I belonged! 

Maybe Mulder regrets that moment...turning to the light of the ship and away from her,  
just as I regret not doing the same. But this is how we wound up: Me, with all the hell of catastrophe, plague and invasion, fighting beside this woman I believe in -- the ONLY thing I've ever believed in, but who hates my guts, and Mulder... 

Well, I have no idea where he ended up. 

Halloween 2000 

Camp Four   
Human territories 

Eastern Colorado 

My mother made a batch of stick figure dolls out of twigs and strips of cloth for the two of us to give away. The first group of children came by at dusk. The last group would probably pass before the stars came out. That was when the war and all its fireworks would take over as the night's entertainment. 

We were all so desperate to act normal. Halloween, whatever it meant before, was a human celebration, and taking part seemed interwoven with survival and every act of defiance against the Grays. It meant that we were still here. 

The adults in camp scrounged for something to give away. For costumes, the children turned their clothes inside out, wore them backwards, switched with friends. "Trick or Treat!" they whispered outside our little shack. We were close enough to a warfront for silence to be mandatory until complete darkness. Whispering would be allowed this one evening. 

I let my mother give out the dolls. The children cradled them in their palms, "Thank you," whispered solemnly in return. It wasn't food but it was the best that mom and I had to give. 

The couple living in the tent beside us was giving out goldfish crackers.   
They'd let Mom have one. Me, they didn't like very much. 

"Trick or Treat!" 

Mom held the twig dolls rolled in the hem of her shirt. I tried not to notice how thin she was, how the bones of her spine were a knotty rope beneath the fabric. One little dark head poked around our cardboard door. "Doctor?" I tried not to know their names and never gave mine while we were in a camp, but I think I melted a little at the boy's almond eyes and his plump lower lip. 

"Yes?" 

"It's me, Adam Treemont. You set my arm two days ago?" He held up the newspaper and glue cast I had made him. He hadn't cried at all and I bet it hurt like hell when I had to press my fingers into his arm to feel for the break. Tough kid. 

"I remember" As usual, my voice was far too flat for my mother and she shot me a pained look over her shoulder, One that said, Why can't you be nice to them?   
I ignored her. 

Adam dragged a tall girl into our shack. They were both red cheeked and panting from the cold.   
"This is my cousin. She just came through." 

"Just came through" meant that before she could enter the camp, the girl had been cut and bled to prove she was human. It was usually a slice down one arm for the blood and one on the back of the neck for the chip,   
both cuts ideally made quickly and with a clean razor blade. But no such luck for Adam's cousin.   
Her arm had two jagged wounds that   
looked like they were made by a saw   
and on the back of her neck was a   
crooked smile cut some 5 inches across. 

"Who did this to you?" 

It came out shrill   
and she looked back, afraid, and tried to pull her arm from my grasp. The children at the door scattered. 

"Dana!" my mother gasped. 

"Look at this!" I twisted the girl's ragged arm to show my mother and the girl whimpered. 

"Sorry Doctor Lady! Sorry!" The girl was pleading and pulling her arm from me. Adam had his hands over my mine. "Doctor! Please, just forget it okay? Okay?" 

I let her go. "Sorry," just as flat as before but without the answering criticizing look from Mom. Both she and the girl were trembling I noticed. When did I become such a bully, such a bitch? I used to believe in this. I sighed. 

"I'll get you something for that,"   
I told her, and I went behind the  
curtain where my mother and I slept, where I kept all my instruments and medicines and the gun I hadn't used since that night I shot the train carrying Cassandra and the horrible fate of this world. 

"You're a lucky girl, I actually have clean bandages on hand." We boiled cloth in a tea made form onions to kill bacteria and help prevent infection. After the cloth was all gone as wrapping on their heads and arms and legs and stuffed into tooth sockets and padded over swollen eyes, my mother sometimes let camp children and women dip their hands in the pot. It made me sick to watch children clamor for the pungent stuff like they had for candy or soda in the days before the war with the Grays. 

If I wasn't treating patients I just kept to myself. 

"What's your name?" I asked Adam's cousin. 

She whispered Cindy or Linda or Sandra. I didn't ask her to repeat it. I squeezed the onion tea over her wounds and wrapped her arm tight. Once it was clean, the neck wound didn't look so bad. "Why don't the two of you go next door and see if they have any goldfish crackers left." Ahh, that perked them up. 

"The man you came with gave us these," said Adam and he held out a little matchbox car and what looked like a diamond engagement ring. 

"Really?" I smirked. The boy flicked his eyes at my half smile with interest. I guess he thought he was on to something that might make me happy, pay me for my trouble. 

"He had a bunch of things: toys and rings and a harmonica." 

No, I couldn't really smile for Adam, although I appreciated the attempt he made. God, he really did remind me of... 

well, the eyes and the lower lip and the general dark haired lankiness reminded me of... 

He just looked a lot like ...him. 

"You better get going." 

My mother said something nice and showed them out. I went back behind the curtain and flopped onto the mattress we shared. She enjoyed the banter, the attempt at normality but I was just too exhausted. My stomach rumbled. I closed my eyes. 

So, Krycek was giving children trinkets from his little tent guarding us? Probably the things he found using a metal detector the last camp had paid us with. I had started to tell them to forget it. We didn't need anything metal, we needed food. But Kycek never turns down a payment of any kind. Fine. Let him lug it through the apocalypse with him. Whatever. 

Children whispered at the door again and I could hear my mother scooping up the dolls but I stayed on the mattress with my eyes shut. So much for Halloween. At least this year I wasn't in a muddy trench waiting to be killed, listening to a recording of Diana Fowley's voice telling me "The aliens mean us no harm. they want peace, just as we do" The idiots poking their heads out in hope were killed immediately of course. You'd be amazed how long a simple trick like that worked. People want to believe. 

Maybe I dozed off because the trick or treaters were gone. The cracks in the roof showed the sky glowing red and orange with explosions I pulled the curtain aside to find that my mother had left the shack. Great, just great. 

I opened the door. Krycek was huddled in conversation with some other men. No sign of Mom. I hung by the door and waited for Krycek to finish. This camp had wanted my services and I suppose the men respected that my mother and I were with a man, but you just can't be too careful.   
Better not to draw attention to myself, not to get anyone started thinking   
of me as anything other than 'The Doctor'. 

The men stayed their distance   
and Krycek strode back over to me. The cold didn't bother him as much as it bothered me. I rubbed my hands together and breathed into them for warmth. He hadn't even zipped his battered black leather jacket. 

"Where's my mother?" I asked him. 

"She said she wanted to go for a walk since the silence is lifted for the night." The aliens had some kind of weaponry that sought targets by the variance in naturally occurring sounds. A waterfall crashing against rocks or a thunderstorm might make a nearby human voice imperceptible to a human ear, but the aliens could zero in on what didn't belong, no matter how loud the surrounding natural noise. The weapons were specific and deadly. The Grays wanted the planet mostly untouched and the people eradicated. 

"Do they want you to fight?" Sometimes this was part of the deal. Krycek would have to join with the other men in camp to sabotage alien outpost machinery or shoot missiles. 

"No, they want you, actually." 

I raised an eyebrow.   
After over a year together I wasn't too worried about what that might mean. "For what?" 

"Hey, it's some equipment they have. I told them you were a scientist and used to be FBI." He grinned at me. The rat. 

"What the fuck did you do that for?" There was no FBI any more, but there were plenty of people ready to blame them and the CIA and DOD for the shit we all lived in now. Military was the only large organized presence still functioning in the world - rag tag, scattered, doomed to failure. 

"Scully, just do it. Okay?" He leaned in on me. That had been bothering me lately...Krycek always hovering and leaning breathing into my hair, whispering in my ear. 

"Why should I?" 

"Because," the flash of his white teeth again, "I think they found a message from Mulder." 

Okay so I'd done more than kick up dirt in search of Halloween treats. I'd snooped around, wanted to see what was here. That was the great thing about the metal detector; it was maybe the perfect alibi in this fucked up world we were all dying in. Someone comes by:  
"hey you, what the hell are you doing over there?" I give him a handful of buttons or a broken army knife or a piece of jewelry and he lets me go on my way. I mean I wasn't taking food and the thing just lit up instead of beeping, so it was all good. Scully just wasn't one for seeing the potential in things. 

I'd gotten us in this camp because it was close to a front and it was poor, dirty and over-crowded. And the crime was supposed to bad here: lots of murders, lately. Lots of suspicion that the camp had been infiltrated by shape shifters, too, so lots of cutting and bleeding. I was desperate because the good camps were doing her no good. Scully was losing her faith. 

We were losing. Well, that was to be expected. We were going to lose, we were ALWAYS going to lose, but it hadn't mattered all that much. I mean, I was doing what was right. I was following someone I could trust to lead me towards this...rightness ...this...moral ground   
that I had never stood on before. Laugh all you want; I had found atonement. 

And now the bitch was going to fuck the whole thing up! She'd lost whatever made her give up life at El Rico, whatever had dragged me like a damn apostle behind her. 

I guess I pictured her as the last human on earth, the Grays circling   
in on her like a pack of wolves, her saint-like death. She made me believe and I wanted...No, I NEEDED that belief back. I was going to die clean. 

Camp Four was going to be just the shit hole to perk up my floundering messiah.   
The place had one hell of a stealth operation going on against the Grays. They had stolen all kinds of shit: tanks, instruments that they couldn't work, and weapons. 

I'd used Scully's history on the Xfiles to get us a pass to see the crap and hoped that she might at least know how to turn something on and   
impress the camp honchos a little. She and Mulder must have seen at least some of the Gray's hardware in action. 

They'd gotten their hands on some of the noise busters. those things that can pick up a baby's cry in a hailstorm and blast the thing from its mother's arms. They had even identified an alien base that they could hear with the thing but you guessed it: the mother-fucking Grays don't make a peep. Occasionally they picked up really distant sounding human voices but they were snatches of conversation. Nothing. I could listen if I wanted. Yeah. Sure. Why not? I thought I might look around for stuff to steal while I did. 

The thing is like a VR suit with these clamp on armbands and silver mittens, no thumb.   
Then the helmet clamps on behind your ears. These giant smoked bulbs lower over where a gray would have eyes,"don't even bother looking in those. we can't adapt them to humans" fine by me, right?   
We were in the same bunker the camp hid most of it's food stores and I was trying to make out what they had in the pilfered clone tanks. Popcorn? Rice? Was there any chance I could get in here alone? 

Then I heard the stuff they had been listening to - recorded silence - like a blank tape or an empty record and then a muffled word or two..."about"? or maybe "again"? And then more silence...then  
the word "please" definitely "please" louder and some kind of moaning or singing... 

Okay so I'm thinking about how they'd blindfolded me on the way down here but I'd counted the steps, the turns, Hell, they didn't know who they were dealing with. I would need something to carry  
the rice in if I stole it out of the tank... 

And then I heard it 

Just a little more clearly than the other crap. 

"To thee old cause! Thou peerless passionate, good cause, 

thou stern, remorseless, sweet idea, Deathless throughout ages, races, lands after a strange sad war..." 

Son of a bitch! 

It was Fox Mulder quoting from Leaves of Grass. That poor, pathetic piece of shit. If that was him, begging, moaning, "please"(and I could see it now) I had one guess what he was longing for, what he wanted. 

"Gentlemen," I announced, and what a joke because we were all filthy, hungry, and longing to kill, "I think I can help you work this thing." I yanked my hand from the listening contraption, gestured at the stock piles of alien bounty. "Help you work all this shit and even get you inside that base" 

I had them. 

"The doctor I'm with?" Some of them nodded. "She used to be a scientist with the FBI, was trained with listening equipment, high tech stuff. She was one of the ones who tried to stop the invasion." 

"No one tried to stop it," someone said from the dirty little crowd of men. 

"Some did. This doctor did. She can help." We needed to get a message to that base, let Mulder know that Scully was here. 

Then start making our demands. 

"Electronic Voice Phenomenon," I whispered to Krycek once our hoods were off and we stood in the bunker. 

"What the fuck is that?" he shot back. One of Camp Four's finest came forward and ended any chance of private conversation with Krycek. 

"He says you might know how to work some of this." I was ushered to a long row of items they had removed from various raids on alien outposts. 

I didn't feel like explaining EVP to Krycek. it had been one of the less interesting cases the X-File division never solved. "Spirits  
in the room caught on tape, is gist of it." Alien invasion had made me a believer in all Mulder's theories, even the ones where I once thought it was perfectly clear I had proved him wrong. 

But Electronic Voice Phenomenon would mean Mulder was dead 

I strolled the line of objects. The big finale to this display was going to be the listening weapon. 

I shook my head. Whatever Krycek had planned here wasn't going to work.   
Mulder wasn't at that base; he couldn't be. Not after all this time, not so close.   
I lifted the silver wand and gave it to the man behind me. "This will kill the shape shifters. Plunge it in the back of their necks." The gruff flannelled men circling me seemed impressed. "You must be very precise." That advice hadn't worked for me. I shrugged and silently wished them luck. 

I swore I was going to fucking kill that bitch. Then she picked up the shape shifter weapon and made the needle pop out. Damn, that was slick. Totally won them over. 

Of course Scully won't work some kind of bullshit on the stuff she doesn't recognize. Would it kill her to just grab something and pretend that it emits poison Gray killing gas or phones up the rebel aliens, or helps you shit out the alien embryo? But no, Scully's completely legit,   
doesn't lie, doesn't even stretch the truth. God damn, if she wasn't my ticket to the big El Rico airbase hangar of the afterlife I would seriously fucking kill her. 

So after the alien equipment dim sum party, we got rounded back to the silver helmet of the listening weapon. They snapped all the shit on her. 

The smoked bulbs lowered down, only they lowered way down, like they were suddenly automated. The guy fitting her up said so too. "I think this thing is working better." 

Scully gasped and straightened up   
like she could really see something. 

"What did you do to it?" 

All the Camp Four tough guys were jostling the technician. "I don't know! I don't think I did anything to it!" 

"Well you must have done something because you made it work," I told him, but I didn't really think that was it. 

Scully had the chip. 

She kept this slice in her skin just below it and mostly no one checked to make another slice. She was the doctor and they were busy making whatever deal with us,   
usually board and food for doctoring   
and maybe fighting, and she was already cut, so... 

"I see the base," she said. 

We all shut up. 

"Tanks."   
She was whispering like we were outside and it was daylight. "Grays...it's a big base" Her voice is all screwy, hoarse and cracking. "There isn't much noise but I can hear some of the people from El Rico..." 

"What's she talking about?" someone grabbed me by my prosthetic arm. 

"I don't know," I said, yanked my arm free. 

Scully was crying, tears dripping down from under the silver mask and onto her jean jacket. "I see Mulder," she said. 

"Who the fuck is Mulder?" someone grumbled behind me. 

Scully sniffed, started to laugh... "and I think he sees me." 

It wasn't the right word - he wasn't seeing me but, I think, feeling me.   
I remembered the dream I'd had one.  
that I had somehow known was him,   
his presence contacting me.   
He seemed aware of me watching him in that same way. He had been waiting for me, eyes closed, kneeling in darkness, waiting for me to see him. When the helmet came off I was still reeling from what I had experienced. It had been like moving around inside the base and not just watching it or listening in. 

"Does this mean they see us as well as hear us?" a man said over my head but not to me. Already someone else was pulling the weapon from my hands and arms and putting it on. 

"Well you have the weapon trained on the base, don't you?" I asked him. All the men looked down at me. "I don't think that they see us until after they pinpoint our location by sound." I wiped at my tears with the palm of my hand, tried to be as matter of fact about that as possible. 

"It isn't working again." The newly suited up man said. 

"I think my partner influenced it somehow," I said but I was suddenly very aware of the chip. Mulder seemed like he was waiting for me to find him using the helmet, but not like he was powering it or controlling it. 

"Your partner?" That voice sounded like he had found new lynching material. 

"She was an FBI agent, I told you, her FBI partner was kidnapped by the aliens," Krycek was going to try and spin this and I needed to let him, trust him. This was his talent after all and my mother and I had lived by it for all these months since the invasion. 

"The Grays don't kidnap, they kill," the lyncher talking again. 

"This FBI agent was special.   
His family let the government experiment on him ... he can talk to them,"   
Krycek was waiting between the   
information he gave them to see how they swallowed it. 

"Then he's a traitor," someone growled. 

"No, he isn't a traitor," I said. "What my friend says is true. The Grays wanted to see how his brain worked. They wanted what to take away our successes at understanding them and they have him there now: watching him, studying him." 

Krycek looked at me with astonishment but thank God the Camp Four men didn't notice. They were actually considering all that I had said. So I lied a little? Krycek lies all the time and I don't get all wiggy over it. 

"Johanssen, Vaughn!" it came as a tinny, echoing page in the concrete bunker. "Get up here! There's been another one!" 

There was a scramble to the north end of the room where a metal door led to a dark stairway to the camp grounds. It seemed that Krycek and I weren't going to be blindfolded on the way out. "Another what?" I asked the sweating bearded man trudging the stairs beside me. 

"Jack the Ripper," he grunted. 

"What?" 

Krycek breathing in my ear again, "They've been having murders here...nasty ones." 

"This is a great place you picked, Krycek." 

He passed me on the stairs, watching me until a missile flair lit all of us in gold and he found whatever he was looking for in my face. "I think it is," he said thoughtful. God, I think he was about to touch me, stroke his one living hand down my cheek. But the shock on my face must have scared him off. I got the bright grin instead. "Yeah, definitely a great place," he said before loping away in his casual, shit eating way. His good hand was in a pocket and his face tilted upward toward the exploding sky, he looked like it was the most pleasant evening he could imagine to be out for a stroll. I shook my head and started back towards the shack. 

I hoped my mother was back because I really wanted to apologize to her - what had gotten into me these months? I felt my old certainty again. There was hope - I would die if I had to but I would have hope. 

In the shack my mother was pacing. "Dana!" she pulled me close to her, pulled my face into her collarbone the way she had when I was younger. "Dana, something evil is in this camp. We need to leave here." 

I pulled away, "What are you talking about?" I wasn't going to leave now. 

"A murderer - killing women - children" She was hoarse but still shrill. Her walk tonight. Oh God. Jack the Ripper. 

"Mom, one of the camp leaders said something about murders happening here. You have to be careful." I could leave the theatrical tag that the bearded man on the stairs had offered until daylight. 

Her hands were like ice holding my cheeks. "I've felt It, Dana, when we first came here and tonight on my walk...places the temperature drops, the sadness...women were killed here." She let go of my cheeks and covered her eyes. Her rosary was looped around her wrist into a tight bracelet. "I can feel these things, Dana. I try not to, just like you, but I can..." her voice broke and she was crying. "It's such a terrible gift God's given us." 

"Let's get you in bed, Mom." She had been through so much, crossing the country with me and a man I wouldn't let her speak to. I had acted so terrible tonight after she worked to make the little dolls. All she wanted was a little happiness, a little normality. I led her to the mattress and tucked our clothes and coats over her. We had one wool blanket and I folded it double and put that on her to. I doubted I would sleep tonight. 

"Dana?" 

"I'm right here Mom." 

"Alex isn't a bad man, is he?" 

I stiffened. I hadn't told her, of course, about Krycek and his part in Melissa's death. I couldn't tell her that it made my stomach roll to think of her making conversation with Krycek, to think of the secret I was keeping from her. 

"It's better if you just let me talk to him. Stay away from him, Mom, trust me." Her eyes were closed and she was drifting off.   
She looked so old to me right then,   
the weight loss and the constant  
exposure to weather and grief had left her face wrinkled and scarred. 

I brought my knees to my chin and watched her sleep, listened to  
the sky crackle overhead, flexed my toes inside my boots to keep them warm. One thought, under my breast, beat time with my heart. 

He's alive. He's alive. He's alive. He's alive. 

One thought part two  
author: probe 

* * *

Early November 2000  
Eastern Colorado   
Just outside Camp Four human territories No Man's Land 

Here's one of the reasons I always work alone: incompetent assholes. 

Like this big guy, Vaughn, who was smoldering beside me. There we were, both face down in the dirt and waiting for the alien hover ship to pull away. You don't move, they don't see you. Easy enough to remember. 

But the big moron had to look back and motion for Scully to stay still. He even whispered, "Don't be afraid, just stay still." When they zapped him, that idiot Vaughn probably thought he was dying a hero. 

Don't be afraid?! It took all my willpower not to crack a smile. For Dana Scully, 'don't be afraid' was a joke. In all the swarms of killer bees, exploding cities and baby aliens feasting on human flesh, I still had not once seen Dana Scully afraid. It was part of what kept me at her side, what drew me to her in the first place. I'd been scrambling to stay alive for so long. I guess I wanted a little of what she had. Scully never scrambled. 

The hover ship moved on. Gotta love that blast of white light. I was rubbing spots out of my eyes after the ship took off. It was dark and I couldn't see a fucking thing. Please tell me we can go back to the camp now. 

"Get up." Scully was at my side and yanking on my prosthetic. How many times   
do I have to tell the bitch not to do that? 

"It's what I said," came the bass whisper of Johansson. "Women don't belong out on these hunts." 

Oh fucking great.   
I was on my feet and forcing my pupils wide until I could see again. Johansson was a barrel-chested  
Ex cop and he looked at me like I was a punk kid he would have liked to arrest back when he had a badge and a jail. "Vaughn should have been minding his own business." 

"Scully was an FBI agent before the invasion. She can handle herself," I said, but that kind of logic was going nowhere with old school Johansson. 

"And when she can't, I take care of her." There was the beat of a second where I wondered if I'd judged correctly and the macho posturing would work on these country cops. I just hoped like hell that Scully wasn't about to crack up laughing or behind me. 

But it looked like I'd assessed the Camp Four honchos pretty well. Johansson and the others nodded with comprehension. Scully was my woman as far as they knew and Vaughn had overstepped his bounds to try and protect her. 

I turned to face the laser eyed hatred from Scully. It made her angry to be confronted with any kind of dependence even when the two of us were getting along, which we weren't at the moment. She preferred to barely acknowledge that we were traveling together. Too bad, Bitch; you wanted to come on this little alien base raid. 

Oh, I knew what she was thinking. She was going to find Mulder,and then she was going to drag his poetry quoting Sappy ass back with us to the murder and starvation paradise that was Camp Four. 

The tension over the cause of Vaughn's death was pushed aside and we all turned back to the distant blue glow of the alien base. I made sure to wait for Scully and look more territorial. 

So now it was Johansson, me, Scully and the three remaining camp honchos on the raid. Too big a group in the first place if you ask me, but hey, my covert operations training on two continents wouldn't impress the band of small town cops and survivalists who make the decisions at Camp Four. 

We trudged over the frozen mud and scrub grass. At least the wind was at our backs. 

Scully stumbled at my side, scowling as usual. I tried to drop behind her, save her from some of the wind. "Listen," I told her, careful that the others wouldn't hear. "We should just hang back this time. Let these guys think they're showing us the ropes." 

She pursed her lips at me like she had a lot to say and didn't trust herself not to shout. We let the others get ahead of us. 

"Or maybe you should turn back, let me check things out," I repeated for the hundredth time that day. "Let me get a feel for what Mulder wants. "   
I wanted to see what I could deal. Mulder might have access to food and weapons, or maybe he could get us on board with the winning side. Oh, I wasn't about to trade him any of that shit for Scully. She was my talisman.   
I'd earned her,   
and I'd earned the redemption she was going to bring me. But I could  
let him think I'd trade. The Mulder I'd known would believe anything. 

Scully cocked an eyebrow at me. Even angry and dirty the woman was all control and certainty. And, for the most part, she really did take care of herself. When the others were far enough in front, she finally spoke, "Do what you want, Krycek." 

"You said he saw you and you saw him." Facts always got her attention. 

She nodded at me and stumbled again. I had to catch her a little with my good arm and she pulled away so fast she nearly fell again. "Okay, so maybe he was looking for you," I said. "But," and here was the source of our disagreement "maybe it was the chip he sensed." 

Her scowl intensified. 

"Or maybe it was just the fact that the listening device was working that he sensed." 

She stopped to look me in the face and I nearly plowed into her. Johansson and the others glanced back at us with a few curious looks.   
I would have bet my next meal that they thought Scully was begging me  
to be careful or telling me she was afraid OR some such bullshit. 

"So what if it was," she said. "I found him. We can help him." She looked down and the wind whipped the ends of her hair against my face. "Or he can help us." 

This time when I brought my arm around her, I didn't let her step away or squirm free. My face was close to hers. "He isn't on your side anymore, Scully," I whispered between gritted teeth. I didn't want Johansson getting too far ahead of us so I released her from my hold. 

"Mulder wouldn't turn on me," she said. 

"He already has." 

Sharp hate from her eyes. 

That look might have scared Mulder but it only made me want to fight. "You haven't seen him for two years. You haven't heard from him for two years. You don't know what they've done to him or who he is anymore." 

Even in the darkening sky, I could see that her eyes were getting wet and it  
made my stomach drop. I'd seen her cry plenty of times. In the beginning when she couldn't save someone she was treating. Or when we were cold and hungry in the mud trenches the first year and Diana Fowley's voice was reassuring us from loud speakers to trust the aliens. Or even the first time, in the first camp, when she saw camp leaders, another band of terrified men trying to keep order, carve the chip from a young boy's neck and then execute him.   
She wasn't made of stone. 

I didn't want to make  
her cry. Through all this hell I was not to blame for one tear from Dana Scully. It seemed like a sin to me in a way, to shake that coolness from her. I was fucking up. 

"Scully," I pleaded. I could hear it in my voice and I just counted my breaths until my stomach unknotted. Come on Scully, please just don't cry. 

"What do you want me to do?" I finally whispered. I felt like shit inside. I never felt like this before I started trying to save my soul. Redemption sucks ass. 

She turned away from me and we continued our miserable trek to the alien base. "We'll lose them if we don't hurry," she said. 

* * *

Krycek was worried about that listening device. It hadn't worked on anybody but me in the three days since I'd worn it. It was only a matter of time before someone suggested putting it back on me and realized why it worked.   
I think his enthusiasm for this raid   
was a way of distracting everyone from trying the device on me again. 

Usually they removed the chip, then the host was killed and the body burned.   
Because even burning didn't destroy the chip, it was left out in an open area for the aliens to find. Reclaim. 

He knew why I wanted to come along. We'd fought about it the entire day. 

I'd been so certain when I'd worn the listening device that Mulder could see me, could hear me. But I can't deny that Krycek's argument hadn't worn on me all day. What had Mulder been trying to tell me when I'd seen him at that base? He had been kneeling in one spot with his eyes closed and not acknowledged my "presence" at all. Was he telling me to stay away? 

I shook my head to clear all the doubts. He needed me. And I needed to   
find him. This fight was so hard, sometimes too hard. And I felt so alone. 

The blue lights of the base shot into the sky in pillars and marked the perimeter of the underground base. I'd been in one before, to place explosives in an attack. An attack which was  
ultimately crushed by the aliens, of course. The alien bases were really   
very similar to what I remembered about the ship Mulder had pulled me from in the Antarctic: cold, dark, lots of metal winding corridors and vast open pits for maneuvering between the corridors. 

When Johansson came to the hover ship exit, he crouched low and crawled over to the closest blue pillar. These   
pillars marked rounded vent shafts leading down into the base. 

At the vent, Johansson kicked aside a trap door made of sticks and dried mud and steam wafted up parallel to the blue beam. The aliens detected you in a second if you made contact with the blue light. We were all breathing hard,afraid to even whisper as we waited our turn to slide in.   
The vent shaft was wet and muddy at the top and the blue light lined one side. We had to flatten to the far side of the   
shaft as we slid down. Krycek was behind me and then on top of me, shielding me from the light and sending me down faster into the base than the careful progress I'd been making. Even with that prosthetic arm he was more agile than any of us making the descent. I thought about the   
training he'd had to make him so good at stealth work and the terrible ways he'd used that training. I think he read it in my face   
because he was grinning at me like he always does when he realizes he's offended me. 

Inside, the base was like the others I'd been in: A freezing,   
barely lit, near empty maze of metal and dripping water. Johansson motioned for us to follow him and we crept along in single file. Krycek was so close behind me that I could feel his breath on my neck. 

We spiraled downward as we followed the corridor. Finally, We came to a ladder leading about ten feet up   
towards a door and Johansson started up it. This must have been where they were salvaging,   
actually stealing, all the junk they had taken. 

"Storeroom" whispered Krycek. I didn't want to see in a storeroom full of alien appliances. 

"I'm going to,"   
I nodded towards the corridor. I wanted to check things out. 

Krycek's face went white with anger. He gripped my arm and tried to force me up the ladder in front of him. The others were already inside the metal door and it was creaking closed. 

I'd gotten in plenty of these physical struggles with Krycek in our two years together. He tried to force me to take shelter in   
bombings or tried to pull me back into the trenches when I had leapt up to stop others from going to the   
aliens, or even to keep me from the injured during bee attacks. So I knew it was a losing battle; he was stronger and a better fighter than I was.   
I let myself be carried up the ladder and through the metal door and he tossed me on the floor like it had hardly cost him any effort. 

The room was just what I'd pictured: a big damp space, piled with things we humans either didn't know how or couldn't use. 

I rubbed at my arm while Krycek stood between me and the door with that same furious stance. 

"Don't worry," I grumbled. "I won't make a run for it if that's what you're thinking." 

Underneath me the floor began to rattle like an earthquake. 

"Shit!" Johansson yelled. "Take cover!" The men dove 

into the stacks, trying to hide. I hate to agree   
with Krycek about anything but they really were idiots. 

Kyrcek and I both dropped face down on the muddy, wet floor, and tried not to breathe. The juvenile aliens were just like the hover ships outside: don't move and you won't be seen. They stepped on Krycek like he was garbage. It had to hurt but he didn't make a sound and let himself get tossed over on his back without blinking. The safest thing would be to close your eyes but neither of us ever did. 

Behind me, Johansson and the others were screaming as they were ripped apart. Rivulets of blood made their way to where I sprawled on   
the floor and soon I was face down in gore. At least it was warm. 

* * *

Fucking Hell my back hurt! 

How long can it take a pack of those things to finish off four guys? 

If I could have just pulled the damn prosthesis out from under my spine then my outlook on life would have been so much better. 

They'd left me face up looking at the ceiling and from where I was left by the dripping alien brat-pack, I couldn't see Scully. She was behind me somewhere, closer to where those things were dining on Camp Four's finest. 

She was worrying me some. Finding Mulder had brought back a little more of the old Scully than I would have liked. . I'd forgotten how rabidly devoted she could be to   
that sap ass Mulder. I stared at the corrugated ceiling and thought, Please GOD don't let her sprint for the door trying to get to him. 

The aliens were out the door before I could fully consider what clout a request from me would have with God. 

When I turned around I saw Scully was still on the floor, but now   
covered in blood. No, no, come on God . You can't do this to me, Dude. 

"What are you looking at?" she snapped at me. She was having a hard time pushing herself up because of the blood and alien slime. 

"I thought you were hurt," I said simply. What WAS that shit the alien's dripped? When I went to help her up, I tried to scrape some of it from her face. It was gooey and stuck to my hand. 

"I'm fine." 

"Good," I shot back. I like this "fine" thing she does. It would be such a pain in the ass if she needed me to baby her or even to really talk. I like how she always seems as contented as I am to just move on from whatever nearly kills her. She pulled off her denim jacket and then her sweater. Underneath was a tight   
black t shirt she didn't look half bad in. The sweater got most   
of the gunk off her face but she had to be freezing. 

"You want my jacket?" I asked her. 

"No, I'm fine." 

See what I mean? 

We both moved slowly from the room and down the ladder. Neither of us looked once in the direction of the alien monster feast. 

Back in the corridor I pulled her into my leather jacket and and she didn't resist. Her teeth had been 

chattering and I'm not a bad guy. Or at least I was trying not to be. 

We weren't headed back to the vent but I didn't hassle her. The place was so empty I thought maybe it was alien naptime. I wanted to look   
around myself. 

When we heard voices,  
I pushed us both to the slimy dripping wall. Human voices, it sounded like. Maybe someone screaming or shouting? Then, more voices. From my past experiences I would have identified it as an interrogation of some sort. 

"Can you tell what their saying?" I asked her. 

She had this   
strange look on her face. Her forehead making those worry creases I had learned to recognize as proof she was distressed. She didn't answer but shrugged out from my jacket and just kept moving down the bend of the corridor. 

"Scully!" I whispered as harshly and loudly as I dared. That pack of the juvenile aliens was   
still in my mind and probably not so far away. She was around the next bend and out of my sight without even looking back. 

"Fuck!" 

From behind me came the scuffle of the pack moving across the grated metal floor.   
If she hadn't heard me then I would have bet she wouldn't have heard them either. The floor was already shaking. 

"Scully!" I rounded the bend in front and plowed over her and onto the   
floor. 

Even though my body was on top of hers, I could feel the trembling grates of the corridor floor. In moments they'd be nearly on top of us. 

Up ahead of us the talking and the shouting had stopped and I could hear the heavy clank of a metal door being slammed. Don't move Scully, I thought. Don't blink. Don't breathe hard. 

Cold slime dripped onto the back of my neck. One   
of them was checking us out. It gingerly placed his claw on my back. FuckFuckFuck. Scully had goose bumps on her flesh. Don't let your teeth chatter, Scully. Don't shiver. 

There was a burst of steam from above and the monsters scattered and pressed back from us. The metal door clanged open again and white bio suits came at us. In back of us, the alien pack was riled up but the steady bursts of steam kept them away. Arms pulled me off of Scully and hauled her up from the floor. I tried to grab her, but the heat from the steam was fucking killing me. My eyes were tearing and I choked on the shit.  
It felt like getting maced. 

I reached out towards a flash of red hair and clutched the stuff like a lifeline. The biosuits dragged us ahead through the clanking metal door. I had finally shut my eyes against the chemical steam but my grip was still hard in Scully's hair. The door shut behind us and both Scully and I gulped in clean air. 

My hand was still tight in her hair when I puked. 

* * *

My eyes cleared before Krycek's eyes did. I'd finally freed his hand from my hair but he held on to my arm like he expected them to wrench us apart. The two men in biosuits had deposited us near the door and shed their masks. They had gone back to a vertical table where I assumed they had their interrogation subject strapped down. I could only see the raised back of the   
table and the top of the man's head. 

"Then who are these two?" One man yelled as he gestured towards   
Krycek and me. "They're here to rescue you, aren't they? They're   
part of your force here on the ground?" 

"I'm alone," the tortured man strapped  
to the   
table choked out. 

It couldn't be who I thought it was. I moved forward to see but Krycek's hand held me in place. 

"I'm alone," the tortured man repeated. 

I didn't like the sound of   
defeat in his voice. Something about his voice had reminded me of the past, of the person I used to be: capable, strong and sure   
of the rules of the world around me. 

Krycek wobbled a little and I thought he was going to vomit again. Instead he sniffed back his streaming nose and stood up straight and a sour smile twisted impossibly at his mouth. He let me lead the two of us forward. 

"Stay back you two!" one of the interrogators yelled. But I didn't need to come any closer.   
I could see the face of the man on the table. His eyes were blackened and he had lost weight but he was still every inch the imposing man he had been. 

The biosuited interrogator slapped him hard across the face. 

"That's enough!" it was out of my mouth before I could think. 

The man's head lolled to the side and he saw me. "Scully?" 

I thought he might cry. I tried to move towards him but both Krycek and one of the biosuited men held me back. 

"Sir," I said and my voice cracked. "Skinner. it's me. I'm right here." 

"Scully," he said again but it wasn't a question. It sounded like a prayer. 

The two interrogators looked at me then and I felt like I had offered up whatever information they had been trying to beat from Skinner. 

"So you are working with him," one accused. 

"No, we aren't," said Krycek. "We came down here looking for food." 

"Right," said the man and he smiled a tight oily smile that said, "You're lying." 

I shook my head. 

"No one comes down a base for food. You are food down here," he said. He had gray hair and eyes and a pinched look about him. The other biosuited man was heavy set and younger looking. They both looked too soft and well fed to have spent much time in the world above ground. In back of them a set of glass doors opened and more biosuited men appeared. I didn't recognize any of them.   
I don't think they could have pried Krycek's hand from my arm if they'd tried, but they didn't. When the needle went in my arm I felt him latch the belt loop of my jeans to something on his jacket. I don't know why he thought they wouldn't just detach us once we HAD passed out. 

I kept my eyes locked on Skinner's as long as I could, 

tried to will him some of my determination. Then I remembered, 

"Mulder?" I asked him, but he just stared back at me. 

"Scully, Scully " he said. I'm not sure if he knew I was there or he thought he was dreaming me. 

Mulder's name did catch the ears of all the biosuited men. The one who'd shot me full of whatever was taking me under drew back in surprise. 

"What did she say?" 

"She asked for Mulder," marveled the man with the syringe. 

I was too fuzzyheaded to say anything else and they knew it. 

"Are you sure it was Mulder?" 

I never heard the answer: I fell back into Krycek and we both slid to the ground. 

"I got you. I got you," he whispered into my hair. 

* * *

"God Damn!"   
My stomach heaved and my eyes felt like were on fire but that wasn't what I was yelling about. Diana Fowley's pointy toed shoe got me right in the balls. 

"I'm awake! I'm awake!" 

In her pressed white suit and expensive heels, she looked like something from one of my "Bad Heaven" dreams. Like this one I have where I make it through the   
pearly gates holding on to the edge of Dana Scully's shirttails but get booted out at the next ID checkpoint. Wait, should Diana Fowley be running Gestapo operations in the after life? And what the fuck was holding my ear? 

"Okay! I'm awake!" I repeated. I tried to stand. Bad idea. "Just,"   
I slapped her polished nails off of their twisting fix on my ear, "Give me a second here." 

It looked like I'd been dumped in a   
padded psych cell: no windows, no furniture, nothing I might injure myself on or make into a weapon. The walls and floor were spongy mats like I'd once trained on for hand-to-hand combat. 

White of course. Someone had taken my clothes away and hosed me down. The prosthesis was still on but wet inside. Very uncomfortable.   
"Where's Scully?" 

Diana nudged a metal crate with my clothes inside towards me. They looked laundered, and the laces on my hiking boots had been replaced. I tried not to gape at the miracle of clean clothes. 

"Get dressed," Diana said. But I wasn't sure I could comply with that right away. I was dizzy and nauseous. What the fuck had been in those syringes? 

"Where's Scully?" Yelling was not helping my symptoms die down. I rubbed my hand over my face. "Just answer, you fucking whore," I whispered. 

Diana's face turned red. Ah hah, some color in all this antiseptic white. "Listen," I thought, maybe I should play nice. Maybe I should make sure they aren't just cleaning me up so they don't have to hold their noses when they kill me. 

"Diana" I used a contrite inflection that I can do very well. "Come on, baby"  
(Can't we just forget about that "fucking whore" comment?) "Scully and I aren't a part of whatever Skinner was getting beaten out of him." 

She crossed her arms and managed a look with a little less hostility. Surely she wasn't just going to take my word for it? "We just came here with a bunch of idiots in a shanty town close by; we came to see what we could pinch." I shrugged. Now this   
she has to believe. 

I was trying to pull my thermal underwear on and my t shirt. I thought if I could just get dressed and stand I might be able to kill her, find the way out of the padded cell and to where they had Scully 

"Hey, it wasn't personal. I know you're probably fighting on a different side than those guys were and" the boots, the jacket, almost there " I got no problem with that. I can respect that." Now I just   
had to stand 

"Don't move, Alex." 

I was looking into the barrel of a 45. Fucking great. 

"No problem," I slid back down. If I hadn't still been semiloaded on the tranquilizer I would have rushed her and been on my way. But the world was still a little fuzzy. For the life of me I couldn't come up with a Plan B. 

However, I could see Diana more clearly than at first. I have to say, alliance with the aliens did not seem to suit her. I mean, compared to girls above ground she looked pretty good. There was the tailored suit and the washed and styled hair and, could it be, perfume?   
I'm sure I smelled perfume. 

But her eyes were shadowed and nervous and her lips were tight on her face. She'd aged the way that people under stress do. It wasn't attractive on her. And she must have known it because she didn't like me sizing her up. 

"Were going to let you go," she said. 

This couldn't be for real. "You are," I stated back to her. 

She didn't move or answer. Was she afraid? "Okay then," I opened my hands, palms up to her. "We'll leave." 

She shook her head and made a taut line of her lips. She was afraid, I was certain. But not of me, no way. The Diana I knew would have coolly blown my head off. No, scratch that. She would have had it   
blown off by someone else. Then, "Just you, Alex. Scully stays." 

"No deal." I did stand up then and she backed up enough to keep the gun aimed at my chest. I felt pretty stable. I suppose killing her was worth a try. 

"It isn't a deal, I'm telling you what to do." She let the gun drop to her side. What the fuck was going on here? "If your thinking of trying something, killing me even, it won't work. Scully's with Mulder and you'll never get past him." 

I think the room was spinning. All that God Damn white made it impossible to know for sure. That indention in the padding, had to be the door right? "Let me out of here." 

"You should leave, Alex." 

"Should?" I turned to face her. She really didn't look good. Her makeup was too heavy on the bags under her eyes. "I thought you were giving me an order." 

Diana shoved the gun towards me. I stepped back in shock but then grabbed it away from her. "What are you afraid of? What's gone wrong here?" 

"It's Mulder," she said. 

Mulder? Pansy ass Mulder, who I could throw to the ground with one arm just as easily as with two? Mulder the cry baby, the poetry quoting love sick feebie. 

I shook my head and smiled at Diana. "You knew what he was, the things done to him when he was a blob in a Petrie dish. Don't tell me it worked?" 

"Of course it worked. It was Spender's pet project. The best geneticists in the world engineered him." 

I waved her away and started for the door again. "I've heard it, Diana. I was assigned to boy genius myself once, remember?" 

"Mulder controls the juvenile aliens. He can talk to them." 

"No shit?" What, like they follow simple commands: sit, heel, shake, play dead? 

"He's the only one the aliens will communicate with. He negotiated our role helping them eradicate the population in exchange for our lives and comforts." 

"Wasn't all that in the bag already?" 

Oh man, the expression on her face was priceless after all the double crossing she'd done in her life. I couldn't help my smile. Payback is a bitch, Diana. Didn't anyone ever tell you that? "So they went back on the   
deal?" 

* * *

At first, all I could do was sleep. 

It had been two years since I'd been in a real bed with sheets and pillows. Clean sheets, clean pillows. When I could keep my eyes open, all I could see were shadows. I was in someone's darkened bedroom. In someone's bed. I didn't think beyond that reality. 

Mulder was sitting beside me when I woke. "Two days," he whispered. 

"That's how long I've been sleeping?" It was, perhaps, the most ridiculous conversation we had ever begun. After all that had happened in the world around us, the horrible fate of everything we knew. I couldn't seem to say more than this. 

He looked older, more that the two years could account for, and he looked even more haunted than when we were on the worst cases, even worse than the times he'd been teased with Samantha and tormented with the   
tangles of conspiracy and Mulder family history. 

"Mulder?" 

He was chewing at his lower lip, his jaw working the way I'd seen it a million times before. His eyes were filled with apology. "You're going to have to go back to the camp. Krycek's waiting there for you." 

I sat up. I was still in the filthy jeans and black t-shirt that I had been caught in. I brought a hand up to my face and brushed back some of my tangled hair. 

"I'd forgotten how beautiful you are, Scully." 

He had never spoken to me like this before the aliens. I let my hand drop down to the bed again. I felt foolish to care about my looks when people were starving and cold in the camp I had just come from. 

Mulder smiled at me and tapped between my breasts where my heart was beating like mad. "Here is where you're beautiful. Inside," he said. 

We both reached for each other at the same time and crushed the other into a hug. 

The tears came to me first for all the days that I had fought a losing battle above ground. And then I was sobbing because I'd had to fight it alone. 

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," he kept saying. My face was against his far too prominent collar bone and when I pulled back and held his face in my dirty hands, I was finally aware that   
something was wrong. 

"Mulder, what is it?" 

"Scully, I'm what you've been fighting against these two years. The aliens don't know this planet or us. They spent so long studying us and infiltrating our most powerful governing forces but they still couldn't determine the best way to wipe all of us out." 

I let my hands drop from his face and he clutched them in his own. He looked like he had when they had drugged his water and he'd been manic and raging. 

Mulder tipped his forehead against mine and closed his eyes but I was tense and afraid. 

"They put me in charge of the war here on the planet," he whispered. 

I drew back. "I don't believe you," I told him. "Open your eyes, look into mine and tell me that it isn't true." 

He shook his head. 

"Open your eyes Mulder. I know you. I know you would never agree to that." 

He did open his eyes, his beautiful eyes, and they were as hard and as cold as I had seen them interviewing suspects. "You saw what they were doing to Skinner?" 

I nodded. His grip on my hands was so strong that it hurt and I tried to pull away. 

"I gave that order. I had him beaten. Skinner's been working with the Alien Rebels to end the takeover." He let go of my hands. "I gave the order to torture him until he revealed his contact with my people." 

"No, Mulder, I don't believe you." 

He stood up. "I'm telling you the truth." he said. 

I looked at him. He was dressed in gray wool slacks and dark sweater that   
looked like the expensive cashmere I had always loved in my previous life. 

Where I'd been sleeping the sheets were streaked with blood and dirt. Had he given up everything we'd believed in for these creature comforts? I thought that he must be congratulating himself for abandoning me at El Rico now that he could see the filth I had brought with me, that I was literally covered in. I thought   
he must be disgusted that I had ruined his pristine sheets. When I looked at him he winced as if in pain. 

I remember him telling me in his apartment hallway that he didn't know if he wanted this fight if I wasn't by his side. And now I didn't know if I wanted it either. 

Had he ever been the man I'd thought he was? 

Krycek told me every day that we were going to lose, that I was a fool for risking my neck to save people who were all going to die. 

"You're not a fool, Scully. Don't give up." 

I started a little at the tone of his voice, flat and sure, more than his words. I'd heard that sad and certain tone before. In Gibson Praise, I thought. 

"You can hear me?" 

He nodded sadly. 

"Is that why you were made the leader of the war here?" 

"They trust me," Mulder said simply. "I was one of the first test subjects. Samantha too, only she was a disappointment to them." He had the cold look   
in his eyes again. "The aliens consider me one of them." 

I couldn't help myself. I gasped. 

But your not, I was thinking. You're not one of them. I thought then about his first words to me, that he was sending me back. He nodded and I could tell he   
was grinding his teeth. His old habit from a different life. 

"Then, you'll kill me if we cross paths above ground?" I asked him. 

He nodded again. "And you should try to kill me. We aren't on the same side   
anymore, Scully." 

I didn't believe him, I couldn't. No matter what he had done, or given up to survive, I could never believe that Fox Mulder would   
be my enemy. 

* * *

Back at the camp, Skinner had his wits about him enough to sit by Margaret Scully's bedside, make that sleeping bag side, and hold her hand while she died. 

I'd had to drag him from the alien base for the first hundred yards. When the bastard finally came to he actually tried to punch me. "What are you doing, Krycek?" he'd snarled at me. His eyes were both completely blood shot and his nose was broken. The human captors had ripped three of his fingernails out of his left hand. He looked the worst I'd ever seen him. 

"I'm saving your ass, man." 

"Take me back." He spat onto the ground, blood and snot. I laughed at him. There was sleet coming down and the temperature was dropping. Already I couldn't feel my toes. 

"You're fucking nuts, Skinner. They were getting ready pull your Goddamn teeth to get you to talk."   
I was panting. Dragging Skinner hundred yards took a lot 

more effort than carrying Scully twice that. 

"Mulder," Skinner said and spit more blood onto the frozen scrub grass. "Mulder shouldn't have let me go. I need to go back." 

I wanted to shake him. "Have you noticed that it's fucking freezing out here?" I said. "They're way better in this stuff that we are." 

"They'll know he's been working with the Rebels," Skinner choked out. I have to admire the loyalty Mulder had inspired in his previous life. Skinner would rather get tortured to death that have the aliens turn on Mulder. 

"He said he can lie to them now." My teeth started chattering. 

"He's more than they counted on." 

Fuck, it was cold. "Come ON, Skinner. " He had dropped to one knee. "Get up!"   
I didn't think I could drag him much   
farther. 

"Scully." I said, yanking him up and pulling one arm over my shoulders. I said it   
just the way he had when he saw her, like it was something sacred, like a prayer. "If the aliens find out they can use her against him, they will. He's going to send her back and then we have to take her away from here, away from him." 

Because Mulder couldn't stop listening to her when she was so close. He'd been blocking   
her by reciting poetry, humming, counting to a thousand but it was too big a temptation. 

"Eventually they'll look into my head again," Mulder had told me, "and they'll find her there. And they'll use her." 

The poor bastard, after the things they did to him, El Rico didn't matter. He'd never had a chance. 

"I'll always hear her." He'd said it like it was a threat and I wasn't   
about to scoff at this new Mulder.   
"It just won't be so strong.   
Everything she touches and hears and   
sees."   
He put his hands on hips and turned away. Must have been Torture to have her so near, to be living inside her and have her completely unaware. 

She was sleeping in his bed in back of us. He hadn't let anyone near her so she was still as dirty and disheveled as I'd last seen her.   
But even filthy with tangled hair and ragged clothes, she was still Scully: honorable and decent and the one person I believed could grant me absolution. 

"When she wakes up, I'll bring her back to you," Mulder told me. He looked like he was going to cry then. His face crumpled and his breath hitched. I guess some things never change. 

Skinner seemed to get better the closer we got to the camp. He stopped spitting blood and he walked on his own more easily. The guy had become the muscled Marine again since the invasion. I had a hard time trying to recall the softer bodied assistant director he had been. "How'd you hitch up with the rebels, anyway?" I asked him. 

"That night at El Rico." Up ahead we could see the camp gate and we both sped up a little now that we had our goal in sight. "The rebels showed up after everyone had gone. No faces," he said. 

"Right, no face on the rebels," I said. Then, "So they left you behind." 

"Must have been my lucky night," he grumbled. 

I have no idea if he meant it as a joke or not. 

We were trying to get warm by a smoking fire at the camp when word came about Margaret Scully. She'd been acting really flaky since we'd come to this camp and in her last hours of consciousness she kept repeating, "the evil, the evil." I thought that pretty much summed up all we had seen. She also asked to be buried outside of the camp fence. I figured the evil could get her just as easily no matter where we dug her grave, but Skinner promised her that he would see to it. 

I tried to stay away. Scully had warned me often enough that I was to keep my distance from her mother. In two years I'd hardly spoken to the woman. Still, I regretted seeing her die. It would hit Scully hard. 

I left Skinner in the dark, holding Margaret Scully's hand while she chanted about the evil and I went back to the fire. The smoke burned my eyes and lungs, but it gave the illusion of warmth. Camp Four was a shit hole. I would be glad to leave and take Scully somewhere Mulder couldn't feel the tears slide down her cheeks the rocks under her sleeping bag, or the scalpel slice just under her chip so we could sneak through camp checkpoints. Mulder sending her away would hit her hard too. I frowned thinking about dragging her out of here. 

Through the campfire smoke I caught flashes of other dirty, hungry faces and they were all frowning at their own dejected thoughts. 

I'd put a lot of faith in the possibility of something waiting after this crappy existence we all had. Something for me, Scully, Camp Four, and the rest of the fucking miserable human race. But at least I had faith now.   
I'd never had faith before. 

I looked up at the sky. The damn explosions started again: our side, their side. It was hard to tell who was firing at who with the heavy sleet still in the air. 

I flipped up the collar of my leather jacket, nudged the prosthesis back in place, and waited for Scully to come home. 

Title: One thought part three  
Author: probe 

Camp Four  
Human territories  
Late November 2000 

I gave Skinner the little amount of food I'd managed to hide from Camp Four's gate guards, just some beef jerky and a Ramen noodle package. Mulder had tried to give me flashlights, matches, candles and everything else he knew I needed and had been living without, but I only took food and medicine for the camp, nothing for myself. I even refused the warm bath he'd run for me. 

His bathroom was beautiful. Like something out of a hotel brochure, with marble and gilt and fat, expensive looking towels. All the rooms belonging to him were unexpectedly luxurious considering the otherwise antiseptic cold of the base. God, how I'd wanted to climb in that bath,   
close my eyes, and pretend I   
still didnt believe in the aliens 

Instead, I'd shaken my head. "Mulder, this isn't you." 

"What choice do I have?" He trailed his long fingers through the water. "I don't belong out there with the human race. I'm not one of them anymore." 

"That isn't true." 

"It is, Scully. My fate was decided a long time ago." 

I held his gaze, my lips pursed, my eyebrows raised. It was the old standoff -- he believed in something that I refused to accept. He nearly smiled at me. He must have been thinking it too. 

He shook the water from his fingers. 

"Leave this place, Mulder." 

"This is where I belong." He strolled from the opulent bathroom, maybe still hoping I would take advantage of it and assuage his guilt. 

I slammed the bathroom door back open. "I'm ready to leave." 

His eyes were dark and his bottom lip jutted forward in a pout that had once meant he might cry. I wondered what it meant for this Mulder, this Mulder who had abandoned humanity in exchange for every creature comfort. 

"Scully," He reached for me but I stepped back from him, something I don't think I'd ever done before. 

"Mulder." My voice was hard and sharp and his name was all I could say. If he could really see inside me then he knew all the things I left silent. 

Still, I couldn't turn down things that I knew other's back at the Camp needed. 

I made the return hike to Camp Four alone. Mulder had the Hover ships grounded, and the juveniles locked up so there was nothing to fear. The gate guards at Camp Four took the pack and everything I'd carried in my pockets: medicine, powdered milk, freeze-dried vegetables and rice. I'd tucked the jerky and the Ramen noodles under my shirt for my mother but I was too late to give them to her. Or to tell her good-bye. 

* 

Skinner stayed long enough to help bury my mother in the nearly frozen ground outside the camp. "Thank you, Sir," I told him. 

He was dirty and sweating in the freezing air, leaning on the shovel for a moment of rest. His eyes had filled then. "Walter," he corrected me. "I don't think I've been worthy of 'SIR' for a long time." 

"But -" 

"I let you down at El Rico," he said, his voice gruff. "I was a coward, Scully, and everything I've done since has been a kind of penance for that one decision." 

"I've survived to fight them." I said. "And so have you." 

He nodded. 

He replaced the last of the dirt and tapped it tight again with back of his shovel. We both stood silent while the sky darkened. 

"Mulder didn't give up, Scully, not completely," Skinner said. "He's been doing what he can for the Rebels and for earth. I'd been ready to die when you and Krycek interrupted the interrogation. Keeping Mulder's role hidden from the aliens is more important than my life." 

Still, I wasn't ready to forgive Mulder's betrayal. "He could join with the Rebels the way you've done. He could fight them openly, give the people left alive strength and hope to fight too." I hated the way my voice shook. I was determined not to cry. "He could fight beside me." 

"Scully, I've seen him communicate with them. He can do almost all the same things they do. Maybe he's where he belongs." 

"I don't want to hear this." 

Skinner wiped the sweat from his face with the edge of his t-shirt. 

"What about the Rebels? He could fight beside you." 

"No." He gathered his sweater and coat from the ground.  
"He couldn't." 

I crossed my arms. "Why not?" I said, hoping to trigger the part of him that had once been my boss. 

Skinner stood and grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me around, one finger tapped hard onto the back of my neck, finding the spot I kept cut as a decoy for the gate guards to check. The chip was safely beneath the cut. Skinner felt the tiny bump that he knew I couldn't live without. 

"Here, this chip that keeps you alive? This chip you have to hide from the humans you fight beside? The aliens changed your DNA and then marked you like this for a reason." 

I whirled to face him again, "Why? What do they want with me?" 

"Spare parts. They can't survive here anymore. They've already adapted to their other planets. When Earth becomes toxic to them, they can harvest what they need." 

It was too horrible to hear. "That's enough." 

"All of you who have the chip, Scully, " 

"Stop it!" I slapped him hard in the face before I could help myself. 

He didn't even flinch. "The Rebels want all of you killed or the chip removed. Either way, Scully, you die." 

I couldn't hide the tears then but I was too angry to really be crying. "Then I picked the right side to be on," I told him. "I'm not fighting for the aliens or the rebel aliens, I'm fighting for Earth." 

Skinner stuffed the food I'd given him, some matches and a bottle of water into the deep pockets of his navy pea coat. It reminded me of the coats issued to my father and brothers in the time before the invasion. I'd dropped to my knees at the foot of my mother's grave and tried to pray but there was so much to pray about and I wasn't sure what to ask for. I knew it wouldn't be long before Krycek came back outside to bring me back to the hut. It would be just the two of us now. 

"I'm going now, Scully." Skinner put his hand on my shoulder and I looked up at him. "One day, I'll come find you again," he added. But I wondered how likely that really was. 

He helped me stand. "But if I die before then, I want you to know something." 

I braced myself for whatever he'd held back from all the awful things he had already said. 

Skinner pulled me to him and kissed me hard on the mouth. 

I was speechless. He turned to go then. At some point twilight had turned to dark night and the bombing had started. I watched his progression into no mans land by the strobe flash of the alien attack. 

* * *

"Can't a guy take a piss?" 

The last two Camp Four honchos, Simmons and Waller bum rushed me before I could get my fly opened. 

They held my face flush to the cement perimeter wall. Waller had his hands in my jacket and under my shirt. "You two want to tell me what you're looking for?" Food? Weapons? 

"He's got a fake arm!" 

I could have over-powered them easily enough, fucking amateurs. Still, killing these idiots wouldn't help our situation any. 

We'd been getting a lot of squinty-eyed appraisal; I could practically see the word "traitor" in those perusals. We'd started having problems the minute Scully got back. She had that fucking unbelievable tale of the former partner who had given her all the supplies she could carry and then just let her go. Someone who still had good inside of him but had lost his way enough to be a big shot with the alien side. I'd been cleaned up. Skinner talked about his connections to the "good" aliens. 

It was all too suspicious. Time to go. 

"He doesn't have anything," Simmons grudgingly admitted. Waller gave me another shove as he took his hands from my jacket. 

"No, I don't fucking have anything," I echoed. "I'm the same as any other cold and starving bastard in this camp-" I turned back to the perimeter wall "- except I have to take a leak." 

"And you got someone at the alien base," said Waller. "And some of our guys got killed there." 

Well, I couldn't really whip it out after that, could I? 

I turned back to Waller. "He isn't her partner anymore. She told you that." 

Inwardly I was wondering why the hell Scully had to tell them the truth about how she got her pack of goodies. "Vaughn and those others would have come back too if they hadn't panicked when the alien monsters attacked." 

"Yeah, funny how you and her made it out and not Vaughn and Johansson. Those guys used to be cops, ya know," Simmons cut in. 

It was like dealing with children. "Scully was an FBI agent." 

Simmons sniffed. "What about you? CIA? Secret Service? Or some kind of secret soldier?" He actually slapped Waller on the arm, he was so pleased with his joke. 

If they only knew, I thought. "I told you, I'm just another poor bastard trying to survive, same as you." 

Simmons was basically an idiot. Waller was the one I was worried about. He had his head down and was chewing over everything that I said, watching me. 

"He let her go," said Waller. "No, wait, he actually helped her first, didn't he?" His voice made my body tense into all the things that Simmons had jokingly called me. "Gave her all those things she asked for first?" 

Simmons couldn't tell the difference but I could read the understanding in Waller's cold eyes. He took a few slow steps backwards like he had a little more idea what I was capable of. 

"Hey, down there!" Some kid was running towards us, yelling. "Hey!" 

Only Simmons turned towards the breathless little kid. "Go on home. It's almost dark. You aren't allowed to play after dark." 

"Hey! Please!" 

"Go home kid!" yelled Simmons. 

"Please!" Even from the corner of my eye, I could see the kid's shirt was soaked in blood and he was hysterical. "Not me, it's my cousin. She's hurt. She's cut." 

Waller looked over his shoulder at me. "Get Scully." 

I knew where to look for her. I'd helped dig Margaret Scully's grave and then left her alone with Skinner. 

After he'd told me about the Rebel aversion to the chip in her neck, I decided I could trust him. The sad fuck had it bad for her, still, and at first I'd worried that he would try taking her away from me. I wasn't giving up Scully or my sacred spot at her side. She was my salvation, and I'd killed for less. Maybe it was better if I didn't think it through too much. 

Her chip saved me the hassle of having to kill him. 

Skinner had already left when I found her. She looked shaken, and shaken by more than her mother's death, but she jumped right back into the business of being the camp doctor. 

Scully knew the kid who had flagged Waller and Simmons and me down. "Adam, are you hurt?" Scully checked the kid's pulse and his pupils. "Get a blanket for him and some hot water to drink." 

The kid shook his head. "No. Not me. My cousin. Come on!" 

She must have been alive when he found her, but by the time we got there, all Scully could do was pronounce the girl dead. Her neck had been sliced open, and she'd suffocated on her own blood. 

Adam started to cry. Poor kid. 

I wrapped Scully in my arms and lead her back to the hut. She was really exhausted and didn't fight me when I took off her boots and wrapped her in a sleeping bag. Mulder had sent her back with her sweater and jean jacket cleaned but she must have refused anything more. She must have stuck to her principles. I brushed the long tangles of her hair from her face and she opened her eyes. 

"When you look at me like that," she whispered, her voice hoarse, "what are you thinking?" 

"I don't know," I whispered back. "I really don't know." 

* * *

I wasn't sure if he understood that his cousin was really gone, so I wanted to be there when Adam woke up. I wanted to know what he had seen. 

Someone had wrapped the girl's body in a piece of burlap. She'd bled out and the cloth had hardened into a cocoon. It made a ripping noise when I separated it from her stiff flesh. 

I was going to stay and catch the killer. I wanted to do that for this little boy. He had trusted me with his cousin once and I still felt responsibility for her. 

Krycek had told me that Mulder wanted me far away so he couldn't hear me, but I thought that was his own conscience he was listening to. Let him be tormented by the truth. He should be by my side. He should be fighting. 

By looking at the corpse, I knew that the killer enjoyed the 'Jack the Ripper' tag he'd been given and was doing his best to live up to it. The girl's torso had been slashed with a razor in a clumsy attempt to disembowel her. 

"Adam." I sat on the little cot beside him. His eyes were red and swollen. I smoothed his dark hair back from his forehead. "Can you tell me about last night, when you found your cousin?" 

Adam nodded. He was a serious boy with the expression I remembered on Gibson Praise. He had seen too much to ever again be completely a child. 

He told me that his cousin had been afraid of the gate guards after the way they had cut her arm to check for red blood and sliced the back of her neck for the chip. Adams cousin had been on her way to one of the camp wells for water. He thought she had probably taken a lonely route to avoid the gates in the perimeter wall. Adam had been sent to hurry her along and he had found her in the last minutes of her life. 

By the time Adam finished his story, Krycek was at the door motioning for me. We walked side by side without talking. Krycek's eyes darted to every dark spot where someone could be waiting to ambush us. 

I frowned at him. "You know, Krycek, the serial killer picks women who are alone, at night." 

"I'm not worried about the killer," he said. Then, "Serial killer, huh?" 

"I think he took the girl's water bucket as a trophy. I bet if we check into the other victims we would find he took something from them as well." 

"But we're leaving," he reminded me, "so we won't be able to check into the others. Right?" 

I didn't answer. 

"Oh fucking come on, Scully!" He stopped and turned me towards him. "Listen, everyone here is suspicious of us. They think we handed the others over to the aliens, That maybe we've been working with them the whole time." 

I crossed my arms and looked up at him. "I'm going to find this killer FIRST." 

Krycek looked towards the sky in exasperation. "Fucking great." 

* 

I'd been to Waller's hut back when Krycek, my mother and I had first come to Camp Four. His wife was eight months pregnant and he had a child with a bad case of eczema. They both looked to be doing alright. The wife had diapers boiling over the small fire in front of the house. 

"Doctor's here! Doctor's here!" A little group of children ran ahead of us. Waller came out and sent his wife inside. 

"What do you two want?" 

Krycek stepped up ahead of me with my theory about the missing water-bucket and other trophies taken from victims. 

I knew he liked to do the talking because he liked to gage whether to use lies or tell the truth. It was something he didn't trust me with. 

Waller nodded us to follow him into the hut he shared with his family. There was a small table in the front area and a sheet blocking out what I assumed was a sleeping area. This was how my mother and I had arranged ours. 

Simmons sat at the table rubbing at his face. "The one armed assassin!" he said when he saw Krycek. 

"Shut up," Waller told him. Simmons face went red and angry. 

Krycek and I exchanged looks. There was a chair that Waller motioned towards and I sat down. Krycek leaned back against the wall by the doorway. His black leather jacket and black sweater and jeans made him nearly invisible in the dark hut. He was tensed and watching and he reminded me of a panther. When he smiled at me I knew that he could sense my aversion. 

We let Waller talk. "If this guy has these so called, trophies, then they're in his hut or on him. Should be easy enough to catch him." 

"We can't just go around, hut to hut, and check for the stuff!" Simmons barked. 

"Why the hell not?" Waller wanted to know. 

"I think that we should get a group together now." I told them. "We need to do it quickly, before the killer can get the trophies out of the camp or discard them in a common area." 

"This is bullshit!" Simmons shoved at the table as he stood and a neat stack of ceramic bowls crashed to the floor. Waller's wife appeared from the hidden half of the hut to clean the mess. "What about these two?" Simmons gestured towards Krycek and me. "What about her boyfriend leading the aliens? What about Vaughn and Johansson?" 

"Vaughn, Johansson and the others are dead," Waller countered. 

A few men in the neighboring huts came to help conduct the search. We split up. Two teams on opposite edges of the camp moving inward. The gate guards were told to seal the entrance. The killer was trapped. 

* * *

By the time my team reached the center of the camp, I had stolen so much stuff that my jacket felt like it weighed as much as I did. I had shoved as much as I could into the lining of my sleeves and the back. 

No sign of the tin water bucket. Waller was getting pissed off. He had promised the people in the camp that rummaging through all their things would produce Jack the Ripper. I could see that he meant to have something to show for his efforts, even if he had to drag forth an innocent man. His role as the leader was at stake. 

There was a big commotion outside the little hut I was digging through. I slipped a couple packages of licorice someone had hidden inside of a pillowcase into my pocket and wandered outside. Our team, headed by Waller, had finally met up with Simmons. 

All these low little fires going near the doorways of each hut were starting to make my eyes sting. Maybe there is something primitive at work in us humans that makes us crave this initial discovery, fire. 

I wanted to take Scully south. The cold didn't bother me as much as the constant presence of smoke. 

"I think your friends the aliens sent you back here to cause trouble," Simmons boomed. The fucking asshole was dragging Scully by the arm from a little tarpaper and stick hut like the one I had just left. There was a crowd made of the two teams and all the stragglers that we had collected. 

Scully and I had split up and I'd taken Waller who was the more ambitious and I figured the more dangerous. Looks like I'd made a mistake. 

I was by Scully's side in a flash, my shoulder under Simmons arm. I could feel the pop as his collarbone snapped. Another mistake. 

Waller and the others pulled me off him and pinned me to the ground. 

Simmons looked rabid. "They've been lying to us! They're with the aliens! They're traitors!" 

The smoke was right in my face. "What the fuck is going on?" I yelled. 

Scully's voice, "Simmons won't let us check his hut." 

"Everyone gets their hut checked out," barked Waller. 

"We didn't look at yours," Simmons said. He was panting from the pain. Considering there was no way to set his collarbone back in place I probably knocked him out of the competition for Camp Leader. Too bad for me, Waller was too slow to realize it. 

"What are you hiding Simmons?" I yelled into the gray sky, into the faces of the stinking men who held me, and the sting of the fire smoke. "If you aren't Jack the Ripper, then let us in your hut." 

A lot of confusion and yelling, someone holding me loosened his grip and I kicked free. I couldn't see Scully anywhere. 

Waller was facing down the crooked, gasping Simmons. "Were going in," Waller told him. Saying it made him in charge even though some men from the team had already shoved their way to the hut. We could all hear them ripping the place apart. Scully stood by Waller with her arms folded over her chest. I moved slowly to her side, planning to pull her away from here. 

We needed to get the fuck out of Camp Four. 

The men came out of the hut shaking their heads. 

"Nothing!" sneered Simmons. He held his one limp arm bent like it was in a sling. "I got nothing to hide," he bellowed to the crowd. 

"Okay then. Calm down," Waller told him. It was obvious to everyone that Waller was disappointed Simmons wasn't the killer. 

"How about you, Waller? That leaves your place." 

Simmons wasn't going to let Waller offer up his place to search. "That means you're Jack the Ripper!" he said. 

There were some gasps and a circle opened up around where Waller stood. "Go check my place. I'm, I'm not the killer," Waller stuttered. 

I had Scully's arm. She turned toward me. "Lets get out of here." 

"No." She broke out of my grasp and stepped in the open circle with Waller. "We'll check his hut." 

"This girl has friends at that alien base," he told the jittery crowd. "She probably has a chip too." 

I lunged for Simmons but he was expecting me this time and he dodged out of the way. I was tackled and my face went into the dirt. 

"Let go of me!" It was Scully. 

"Don't touch her!" I shouted. 

Someone ground my face into the dirt. "Shut up you," he said. 

"Don't anyone touch her!" 

The crowd was jostling, angry. The cold, the smoke, the war was making us all insane and savage. 

"Why should we check his hut?" Simmons yelled. "We know he's the killer. He's the only one left!" 

I could hear Scully scream, men and women shout, a baby cried. The people holding me down let go. 

I'd have jumped up but the hover ships were above us. Their white light poured down suddenly like the voice of God. 

Scully. It was the only thing I could think. Scully. 

Even as the men who had held me down turned to ash, even as the smoke of smoldering human flesh stung my eyes, I knew she was alive. 

The alien attack, the hover ships, this was Mulder's work. It had to be. 

* * *

Simmons, his hand around my throat, had knocked me to my knees. The crowd was beating Waller to death, ripping at his hair and gouging his eyes. Simmons was stronger than I would have thought. He smiled while he strangled me. Killing must be something he enjoyed. 

He released me and I tasted blood in my mouth. The shoulder that Krycek had knocked hung at an unnatural angle. It looked like a broken collarbone. "Stop," I gasped. "Stop them. They're killing Waller!" 

Simmons rooted in his jean pocket for something, his face was different. He had the serene quality that I had seen on the criminally insane. The flash of something silver in his hand. He'd found what he was looking for. A straight razor. 

"You," I choked. 

"Me," he agreed with a smile and held the razor in the air above my head. When the light of the hover ship hit it, the glare was like looking into the sun. 

Simmons was gone in that same instant. The ash from his body flew into my mouth and my eyes. The straight razor, blackened and twisted, dropped onto the sizzling meat that was left. 

I closed my eyes. 

When I opened them, Camp Four was destroyed. Mulder had killed everyone and burned down every hut. The perimeter wall had been blasted to rubble. Krycek pulled me over it, the boulder-like hunks of cement and scrap iron. My mother's grave was obliterated beneath. 

The hover ships had gone and the air was cold, the sky growing dark. I'd insisted on walking through the camp before we left, looking for survivors. There was nothing to find. The pile of greasy ash in Adam Treemont's bed made me cry. 

Mulder had saved my life but at the cost of people I was fighting for. 

Maybe not everyone deserved saving: monsters like Simmons or brutes like Waller and the gate guards. But life, human life, was still precious to me. My mother and Skinner and Adam, they all were worth fighting for. 

Even Krycek was worth fighting for. 

He dried my tears on his shirt, fed me stolen licorice and carried me with one arm when I thought I couldn't go on. 

We walked for three days. 

Somewhere far in the distance were the Rocky Mountains, in the alien territories. There were no bombs in our zone. There was no one to send them back from the human front. On the third day, Krycek dropped to his knees. "Need to rest, Scully," he said, his forehead on my shoulder. "It's pretty cold." 

I put my arms around him. When the last of the sun was gone we were probably going to freeze to death. 

Krycek had wanted to go back to the alien base. We had no shelter or water. Our blankets and sleeping bags had burned. 

I refused. 

'Stay away from me Mulder,' I repeated again and again in my thoughts. 'You're a monster. I don't want your help.' I remembered Adam looking at me with trusting hazel eyes. Diana Fowley's voice promising sanctuary but delivering death. Mulder pulling his gun on me at El Rico. 'I'd rather be dead,' I sent out to him. 

Krycek fell to the side and lay in the snow. His eyes blinked at the sky. "North," he coughed to me. "Camp Three is north." 

"Get up, Alex." 

"I don't think I can." He put his arms around me and we huddled together. "After I'm dead -" he started. 

"I won't let you die," I told him, but he laughed at me. 

His chest rattled when he sucked in air. "Listen to me, Scully, this is important. After I'm dead," he began again. He was struggling for every breath. 

"After I am dead, you can have my leather jacket." 

I smiled against his chest. 

"Did you hear me?" he asked. He lifted his head up a little and then let it plop back into the snow. 

"Alex," I told him. "You've been at my side this whole time. Since El Rico." 

I put my face over his so I could look into his eyes, so I could be certain he heard me. "I used to think you were my enemy. That you were the personification of deceit and treachery." 

His face was that look he gave me that I never understood. "You don't think that anymore?" he wheezed. 

"No." I whispered. "For whatever it's worth, Alex Krycek, you've redeemed yourself in my eyes." 

He closed his eyes and nodded and I lay on top of him. We were dying. 

'Don't come for me Mulder,' I chanted inside my head. 'I won't go to your side. I don't want your help.' 

The snow fell, blew over us. We would be covered soon, then buried. 

'I'd rather be dead,' I thought to Mulder. 'I'd rather be dead.' 

* * *

The Rebels have those same underground bases as the aliens we're at war with. The good news being that the place is absolutely smoke free. The bad news is that day or night, it's freeze your balls off cold. 

Skinner says I'll get used to it. 

Another important difference is that the Rebels have the decency not to feed their babies human popsicles. This produces a much more docile monster. They don't try to eat us when they've been raised on the food from their own planet. 

Still, Mulder's the only one of us humans at the base who seems completely comfortable with the things in the room. 

I haven't talked to him that much. Skinner says Mulder used his alien healing voodoo on me and now I owe him my life. I say that if I don't remember it then it didn't happen. I'm heading south first chance I get. 

Mulder came over to the Rebels on a trade: They let him keep Scully and he kills every living thing in his alien home base. It makes me laugh. They should have asked for more. 

Skinner warned me that the "killing every living thing" half of the deal is not to be told to Scully. I told him she'd figure it out and that I don't lie anymore. 

"Fuck you, Krycek," he'd growled. 

I just shrugged. I don't need him to believe me. I guess Mulder told her some version of what he'd done that she approved of because I saw them smiling at each other in one of her brief moments awake. 

Mulder knew Scully and I were dying that last night in the snow. While I was carrying her across the plain, Scully was telling him he could go fuck himself if he thought she would let a traitor save her life. 

This is in my own words of course. 

Whatever she did, she managed to show him that there was a way out of the hole he'd crawled into at El Rico if he wanted it bad enough. 

And of course he wanted it, wanted her more than he'd ever wanted his life of luxury at the alien base or his answers, even his truth. 

It was the oldest trick in the How to Play Mulder book; put Scully's life in peril and have him eating out of your hand. I'd have done it myself in my old life. 

I'm a reformed man now. 

Scully is asleep in Mulder's room. She's been pretty much out of it for the last couple days since we were rescued. Mulder doesn't leave her side except when the Rebels need him for something. I'd like to be here when she is up and feeling better, but I don't think she needs me anymore. 

And she already gave me what I needed from her. 

Thirteen hours from now, a Rebel transport leaves for what used to be the Gulf of Mexico. 

I'm going to start a life,help the human colonies there rebuilding agriculture. Maybe. 

Do something worth something. 

I knock on Mulder's door. When he doesn't answer I stick my head in anyway. They're both asleep. Scully's arms circle Mulder's waist. Her head is tucked beneath his chin. I probably won't get the chance to tell them goodbye. 

Scully's hair is brushed and clean. Her clothes are new. Mulder healed the frostbite burns and her skin is smooth and white again. 

She looks just the way she did that night at El Rico, only happy. 

#### If you enjoyed this story, please feed the author.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Title: **one thought**  
Author: probe  
Details: 96k  ·  PG-13  ·  Series  ·  01/04/06  ·   Email/Website      
Gossamer Category(Keywords): Story   [Angst]   (Alternate universe)   
Characters: scully, krycek     
Pairings: Mulder/Scully UST   
SUMMARY: what if krycek had gotten to the alien fetus before the rebel aliens? 


End file.
